Hotel Room 12th Floor 
Hotel Room, 12 Floor
(1968)
th
Norman MacCaig
Hotel Room, 12th Floor by Norman MacCaig
This morning I watched from here a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect the Empire State building, that jumbo size dentist’s drill, and landing on the roof of the PanAm skyscraper.
But now Midnight has come in from foreign places. Its uncivilised darkness is shot at by a million lit windows, all ups and acrosses.
But midnight is not so easily defeated. I lie in bed, between a radio and a television set, and hear the wildest of warwhoops continually ululating through the glittering canyons and gulches – police cars and ambulances racing to broken bones, the harsh screaming from coldwater flats, the blood glazed on the sidewalks.
The frontier is never somewhere else. And no stockades can keep the midnight out.
Norman MacCaig biography
• Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. Although he spent all his childhood and his later life in Scotland's capital, his mother's Highland past was a great influence on the young poet. • MacCaig's formal education was firmly rooted in the Edinburgh soil: he attended the Royal High
School and then Edinburgh University where he studied Classics. He then trained to be a teacher at Moray House in Edinburgh and spent a large part of his life as a primary school teacher.
• During the war MacCaig refused to fight because he did not want to kill people who he felt were just the same as him. He therefore spent time in various prisons and doing landwork because of his pacifist views.
• Norman MacCaig's poetry began as part of the New Apocalypse Movement, a surrealist mode of writing which he later disowned turning instead to more precise, often witty observations. He was great friends with Hugh MacDiarmid and other Scottish poets he met with in the bars of
Edinburgh to debate, laugh and drink. Although he was never persuaded by his literary friends to write in Scots, he was respected by friends such as MacDiarmid as having made an
(1968)
th
Norman MacCaig
Hotel Room, 12th Floor by Norman MacCaig
This morning I watched from here a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect the Empire State building, that jumbo size dentist’s drill, and landing on the roof of the PanAm skyscraper.
But now Midnight has come in from foreign places. Its uncivilised darkness is shot at by a million lit windows, all ups and acrosses.
But midnight is not so easily defeated. I lie in bed, between a radio and a television set, and hear the wildest of warwhoops continually ululating through the glittering canyons and gulches – police cars and ambulances racing to broken bones, the harsh screaming from coldwater flats, the blood glazed on the sidewalks.
The frontier is never somewhere else. And no stockades can keep the midnight out.
Norman MacCaig biography
• Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. Although he spent all his childhood and his later life in Scotland's capital, his mother's Highland past was a great influence on the young poet. • MacCaig's formal education was firmly rooted in the Edinburgh soil: he attended the Royal High
School and then Edinburgh University where he studied Classics. He then trained to be a teacher at Moray House in Edinburgh and spent a large part of his life as a primary school teacher.
• During the war MacCaig refused to fight because he did not want to kill people who he felt were just the same as him. He therefore spent time in various prisons and doing landwork because of his pacifist views.
• Norman MacCaig's poetry began as part of the New Apocalypse Movement, a surrealist mode of writing which he later disowned turning instead to more precise, often witty observations. He was great friends with Hugh MacDiarmid and other Scottish poets he met with in the bars of
Edinburgh to debate, laugh and drink. Although he was never persuaded by his literary friends to write in Scots, he was respected by friends such as MacDiarmid as having made an